Abstract

In India, one of the first questions you heard was about your ‘native place’. Not necessarily where you live but where you belong. Can a place, a certain administrative demarcation, lend you roots though? And if yes, what is the nature of these roots?

In a time when people are not only moving more often and much further from their ancestral villages and towns, the question is further complicated by new technologies that can potentially bring new cultural experience, and even a sense of community, to any corner of the globe.

Paradoxically, through nativist movements and an aggressive nationalism, citizens seek to define themselves not in terms of who they are or what they value, but through who they are not.

Through memory and personal narratives, the writer attempts to examine her affiliation with, and affinity for, the ‘native’ locations that lend her roots.